ertainly, a discussion of Dickens as a
professional writer should always begin with the genre
for which he was first paid for working within. For his
first published piece, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk,"
The Monthly Magazine paid him nothing. It
received from the would-be writer a further eight stories
gratis over the first six months of 1834. In
August, he used the pseudonym 'Boz' for the first time.
From September, 1834, The Evening Chronicle
paid young Charles Dickens for a series of "Street
Sketches." Since, as both recent Dickens biographers,
Fred Kaplan and Peter Ackroyd, point out, Dickens's
early reputation rested on his Sketches , he
must be regarded as a short story writer who made the
transition to novel writing through the highly episodic
Pickwick Papers , whose early numbers
contain no less than nine framed tales. In her June, 1980,
article entitled "Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale
Themes," Ruth Glancy suggests that throughout his
career as a short-story writer Dickens was looking for an
almost Chaucerian framework that would enable him to
achieve "a cohesive relationship among narrator, tale, and
audience" (55), his childhood favourite, The
Arabian Nights, providing a possible model of a
story-telling compact or club. As editor of the weekly
journals Household Words and All the
Year Round , Dickens had attempted to explain for
his contributing writers his notion of the controlling
theme of the framed stories for a given Christmas
number.

Beginning with the extra Christmas number
for 1854, Dickens attempted to construct a narrative
framework that would enable him to establish the overall
theme and to write the opening segment and the links
between stories contributed by writers from his 'stable'.
Stone reprints in Charles Dickens' Uncollected
Writings from Household Words 1850-1859
(1968) Dickens's detailed instructions to his
colleagues: "Mem. for Christmas Number," 30th
September 1856 (II: 665-6). As opposed to the
humorous and casual invitation that he had sent to the
Reverend James White on 19 October 1852 regarding
A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire ,
these later instructions are in earnest. For example, he
stipulates that contributors may use either first- or third-
person point of view, and that "The adventures narrated
need not of necessity have happened in all cases to the
people in the boat [i. e., the life-boats of the Golden
Mary ], themselves" (II: 665). Significantly, he
specifies to White that "There are persons of both Sexes
in the boat" (II: 666), implying that there may well be
female personas. However, with the exception of Wilkie Collins (who was given command of the Golden
Mary 's second lifeboat, for example, in the 1856
project) seldom did Dickens's collaborators fully grasp
the interdependent relationship between the framework,
the narrators, and their tales which would (he hoped)
"illuminat[e] and complet[e] each other primarily through
auto-biographical storytelling" (Glancy 58). Again and
again at Christmas, whether in The Christmas
Books , Christmas chapters in novels, or in the
Christmas numbers of his weeklies, Dickens returns to
his concern for memory as an integral aspect of the
moral life, especially "the importance of retaining
through memory the child's imaginative capacity, and
through that imagination, the adult's understanding of
compassion" (59). Glancy argues that Dickens's most
successful framed tale is Somebody's Luggage
(1862), and that afterwards Dickens began looking
for "self-contained frameworks" such as those in
Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings and Dr.
Marigold's Prescriptions . The Haunted
House and The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners (the latter written in close
collaboration with Collins) show the dangers Dickens
braved in erecting bookends for other writers to fill,
since the others could sustain neither the narrative voice
(or voices) nor the theme of moral regeneration through
forgiveness.

Glancy is most thorough in her analysis (and
synopsis) of Mugby Junction , but begins, as
it were, in medias res (with the framed tale of
"The Baron of Grogzwig" in the early novel
Nicholas Nickleby), totally disregarding any
possible patterns in Sketches by Boz and
The Pickwick Papers at the early stages of
Dickens's career and A Holiday Romance at
the close. In fact, Dickens seems to have been interested
in producing narrative designs that would permit him to
use a range of voices, so that, for example, in
Pickwick 's lighter moments the narrative
voice of the framed tale is somber and moralizing,
whereas, when the shades of lawsuit and prison darken
the tone of the main story, the narrative voice of the
framed tale is buoyant, sprightly, and cheerily anecdotal.
In short, what Dickens wanted was a Shakespearean
balance of the comic and tragic elements so that he
could appeal to the whole range of his reader's emotions.
Then, too, with the pressures of writing the longer
novels, of editing a weekly journal, and of public tours
and familial responsibilities came a natural desire to
slough off some of the periodical writing, delegating or,
as Dickens himself put it, 'conducting' an orchestra of
authorial voices. Towards the end of his career,
frustrated with the inability of the orchestra members to
interpret his symphonic designs, Dickens abandoned the
notion of having others write for him, producing shorter
framed tales with such controlling narrative voices as
Mrs. Lirriper's and William Tinkling's in A Holiday
Romance .

Deborah A. Thomas in Dickens and the
Short Story (1982) has been criticized already for
certain shortcomings in her approach. Moreover, in
relating the short fiction to Dickens's major novels, she
tends to underrate much of Dickens's work in the short
story genre. Her thesis, if it may be termed one, is that
Dickens' Christmas writing is concerned with "asexual
juvenile passion" (67), an idea which ties in nicely with
Arthur Clennam's attachment to Flora Finching in
Little Dorrit , but does not incorporate the
short stories' main themes of memory and moral life, of
tolerance for foibles and contempt for baseness, of the
need for compassion and understanding in contemporary
society. Thomas is very much aware of the range of
Dickens's narrative voices, but seems unappreciative of
the infinite pains Dickens takes to construct each of
them. Her best piece of analysis is that of "George
Silverman's Explanation," although even here she exhibits
a tendency to summarize and contextualize rather than to
interpret.